Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Novel Support Group 11/18

This is topic Novel Support Group 11/18 - 11/24 in forum Hatrack Groups at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Meredith (Member # 8368) on :

quote:
Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).

What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them?
Describe what you worked on.
Set goals for next week.
Did you learn something during this week?

Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).

Writing on a novel
Characterization
World Building
Relevant research

=-=-=-=-=

As for me:

Last Week's Goals:

THE SHAMAN'S CURSE/THE VOICE OF PROPHECY/BEYOND THE PROPHECY: Nothing this week.
Easy one. [Smile]

WAR OF MAGIC: Social media promotion.
A very little. [Smile]

BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Continue writing first draft.
Yes. [Smile]

OTHER:
Update my blog twice a week.
Yes. [Smile]

Next Week's Goals:

DUAL MAGICS SERIES (THE SHAMAN'S CURS, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC):
Social media promotion.

BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING:
Continue writing first draft.

MAGE STORM:
Think about dusting this one off to work on (rewrite) while I mull over certain points in BECOME.

OTHER:
Update my blog twice a week.

Posted by LDWriter2 (Member # 9148) on :

Haven't been updating my novels because I have been busy with one. A NaNo novel.

But I just realized I could have been updating "The Search" here all along.

Got to 38,000 and some words.

The story is SF based on a Star Wars dream I had years ago. Can't take the time to go into detail about that but there was a Hans Solo type of character and a Luke Skywalker type-no Chewie though. And of course a Darth Vader even though my dream changed him in an odd way. Anyway so I used that and changed the characters a bit and the ship. So now instead of a Wookie his more or less partner is the ship or its AI computer. Luke is Ray's apprentice and is named Raul. There is a huge globe space station that is its own country or kingdom complete with King.

There have been space battles, running, since the universe is based on Earth in the far future there are human colonies all over the place. And I detail a couple of them and just mention a few others.

Ray is searching for something, at first for the money it will bring but later because of the danger it brings if the Warlord and His Second gets ahold of it. Now he has just gotten a revelation of where the thing is and is headed back there.

Posted by H Reinhold (Member # 10553) on :

Over the past weeks I've been working on my NaNo novel too, but I've fallen behind rather spectacularly. As of today, I'm still hovering just over 20,000 words. I enjoy the story, but it's grown more complex than I had anticipated, and I want to let the story ripen a bit more before I continue.

However, the real reason why the novel slowed down is that I've been focusing on short stories, and I think I'm beginning to make some progress. (One advantage of NaNo this year was that, shortly after the beginning of November, I began tracking all my writing--not just NaNo--in a table, updating daily which stories I was working on and how far along they were. According to my chart, I'm close to the 50,000 word mark for writing during November--not a NaNo win, since over half of this word count comes from unrelated short stories, but something I'm very happy with.) I'm enjoying the short stories, learning a lot, and gradually edging some drafts into a state ready to share or submit.

My latest set of drafts got some interesting (and irrefutable) feedback from my first reader: in each of the three stories I'd written, sequencing glitches caused the reader to stumble. I referred to events in the wrong chronological order (temporal confusion). Or I'd refer to something significant, but introduce it properly only later, and after the explanation was actually needed. In both cases the reader was left scrambling to figure out the original order of logic or events implied. This problem has come up before in my writing (e.g. here on Hatrack in my entry to the latest 13-line writing challenge), but a one-off criticism can be dismissed as an unlucky fluke. Going over drafts of different pieces at once with my first reader and finding the same problem in each piece means I can't just ignore the issue--I know I've got to take it seriously, and put in work to fix it.

A similar thing happened a few weeks ago. I had recurring problems in all my drafts with establishing an early, strong connection between reader and protagonist, and my reader pointed this out to me. Finding the same weakness in each of my stories' openings was impossible to dismiss as mere chance, so I knew I had some work to do. Since then (fingers crossed) my openings have improved.